X is expanding access to a rebuilt version of its website for signed-in accounts market by market after a company comparison found profile posts appeared much sooner under a simulated slow connection.
In measurements conducted Nov. 3, the new app showed the first post on a profile after a median 2.7 seconds, compared with 23.9 seconds on the older site. Principal Engineer Yagiz Nizipli detailed the comparison in an X engineering post published Nov. 4; the same signed-in account was used for three runs of each version.
The test used Lighthouse’s Slow 4G profile, with a 150-millisecond round-trip delay, download capacity of 1.6 megabits per second and upload capacity of 750 kilobits per second. X cleared the browser cache, disabled service workers and applied no simulated processor slowdown.
The result tracks how soon a reader sees the first post, not when every element on the page finishes loading. Nizipli said the new app’s first response is slower on signed-in profile and post pages, even as their first posts arrive faster; the home timeline sees a smaller gain.
X said the former architecture split requests among three servers serving people, search crawlers and link previews. Browsers also had to download and run JavaScript before requesting profile information. Under the rebuild, X says one server now handles work that had been divided among the three.
X has already moved its logged-out website and search-facing pages to the rebuilt app. Signed-in users are being added market by market, and Nizipli said the previous app will be retired after migration. The engineering post did not give a target date for completing the transition.
Nizipli cited Twitter Lite, launched in 2017 for people using slow connections, as an earlier effort aimed at improving access under similar network constraints. X said actual performance can vary by device and network, so the lab comparison does not guarantee a particular load time for each user.
